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As is her custom when she visits Ottawa, Premier Kathleen Wynne gave a speech Thursday in which she slapped Prime Minister Stephen Harper across the face.

She did it a couple of times during last spring’s provincial election campaign, denouncing a federal policy change that cut $641 million in transfer payments Ontario was expecting and criticizing Harper and his ministers for leaving Ontario to go it alone with its provincial pension plan.

Reevely: Kathleen Wynne bets on Justin TrudeauBack to video

The premier was in a fight to keep her job then. Things get said. People understand. But Thursday, speaking to a crowd of mostly Liberal policy nerds at the Ottawa Convention Centre, Wynne again talked smack.

It’s as if she were still campaigning. Which she is, for the federal Liberals’ Justin Trudeau.

The Liberal premier spent the first half of her speech explaining how she is a practical person who wants sensible solutions to real problems. Unlike her opponents. In Wynne’s formulation, she has “values,” which are good things that help them figure out which parts of the world need fixing. People who aren’t Liberals have “ideologies,” which are bad things that force them to pretend the world is different from the way it really is.

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“I’m not in politics because I’m trying to put into practice the musings of a long-dead political philosopher,” Wynne said. “I’m in politics to take on the real challenges that affect the lives of real people.”

The line could not have failed to get up the nose of anybody who doesn’t see the world the way Wynne does. Nobody thinks they’re in politics to fool around with philosophical musings, including Harper. The work is way too hard for anyone to do it for any reason other than taking on real challenges.

Wynne is extraordinarily precise when she speaks, even off the cuff. She’d have known how she sounded.

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Having laid her groundwork, Wynne got specific. She rehashed her disagreements with the federal Conservatives on pensions and on transfer payments, both of which are matters of basic fairness, she said.

And on the transfer payments: “This is not a partisan or even a personal discussion,” she said. “It’s about the people of Ontario as part of the country. It’s about (how), when hard times hit a federation, we hang together.”

Then she moved on to the $1 billion in federal money she wants to help dig up the Ring of Fire mineral deposits in Northern Ontario and — the big one — a demand the feds more than double their spending on roads and bridges and transit.

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“This is a concern in every province and territory in Canada,” Wynne said. Every premier, practically every municipal leader, wants billions more federal dollars and Harper just says no. Because he’s an ideologue, not a practical problem-solver.

In a scrum afterward, Wynne said she’d be perfectly willing to work with the federal government on, say, expanding the Canada Pension Plan if Harper had a change of heart. “There’s always hope,” she said, with a shrug to imply she sees no hope whatsoever.

Harper has never reacted well to being shoved and he’s not likely to start writing billion-dollar cheques all of a sudden because Kathleen Wynne says he’s mean. She’s pretty well writing him off.

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Going after the prime minister certainly doesn’t look like bad politics today, with two polls out in just the last few days showing Trudeau’s Liberals widening their lead over Harper’s Conservatives. He’s the one in trouble, not her; her values just won her a majority government.

If Wynne can help get Justin Trudeau elected — as he helped her last spring, bringing his glamorous self to a couple of campaign stops in Ottawa and Toronto when a Liberal win was far from certain — then she’ll have a much friendlier negotiating partner on Parliament Hill around this time next year.

But she’s still making a bet. The federal Tories haven’t figured Trudeau out but they might yet. Or he could implode on his own, with an insouciant line or two that goes just a little too far. If that happens and Wynne is still facing Harper across the table after 2015, relations between Canada’s federal government and its biggest province will be chilly for years to come.

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